Alchemis started as a side project — one developer, one partner, one shelf of beautifully kept potion books. It started with cosmetics; it didn't stay there. This is the rest of how it happened.
My partner makes things by hand — soaps, balms, oils, candles, the occasional batch of preserves. The kind of witchy DIY where recipes live in beautifully kept potion books with hand-written notes, marginalia, sketches of what worked and what didn't.
I love those books. The craft is real. The books are a thing of beauty. Every recipe a record of attention. There was no version of this we wanted to "replace with software."
When you start running real batches — selling at markets, juggling stock, calculating costs, redistributing percentages because you changed one ingredient — the spell-book stops being enough.
Math gets done on envelopes. Stock gets counted twice. The witchy aesthetic and the production reality stop being friends. That's the moment Alchemis exists to remove. Not the books — the math.
I'm a developer. She makes the magic. So I built her a tool that respects the craft, but takes the friction out of the math.
Every feature in Alchemis exists because she needed it. Percentage redistribution was the first one — she'd change one ingredient and didn't want to recalculate the whole recipe by hand.
Density-aware unit conversion came next — oils in ml, batch size in g, kept tripping her up. Soft amber warnings on compliance came after she said the red ones made her feel like she was doing something wrong.
She isn't. She just needs context. So we built context in. And then we noticed: every other small-batch maker we knew — candlemaker, soapmaker, herbalist, the friend doing hot-sauce for the Saturday market — was fighting the exact same fight. Alchemis opened, regardless of what you brew.
Two desks, one workshop. Everything you use was sketched at one and shouted across to the other.
Self-taught formulator. Calls her workbench "the kitchen," keeps her recipes in three potion books, sells at markets and online. Started with balms and salves; the candles came next; the soap moulds arrived last month.
Software engineer with no cosmetics background. Started by building a percentage calculator on a Saturday. The rest got added one feature at a time, each one because she asked.
Anyone designing for Alchemis reads this first. It's the most useful thing we've written.
Never imply the user is doing it wrong, behind, primitive, or unprofessional. They aren't. Hand-written notes are good — until they aren't.
Alchemis doesn't turn a witch into a CEO. It removes the parts of running a business that get in the way of the craft.
"Magical" is OK. "Optimize your workflow" is not. The product is calm and confident; the language stays human.
Sage and gold, not neon. Poppins, not Helvetica. Photography of real workbenches, never AI-stock cosmetics.
Dialled-in visually, mentioned once verbally, then let the product speak. Resist over-witching. The product is the show.
formula. The maker's word.Operations, operationalize, workflow optimizationEnterprise-grade, industrial-strengthDisrupt, revolutionize, AI-poweredSolution — use "tool" or "app"Synergy, leverage — 2010 SaaS-deck wordsWrong, violation, illegal on compliance. Soft over hard.First commit. A single screen that auto-redistributes ingredient percentages. Half a day's work; the start of everything.
Recipes meet reality. The first market run. 47 jars of calendula salve, all tracked back to one batch lot.
IFRA, EU Annex III, INCI, EN 15493 for candles, CLP for cleaners, SAP for soaps. The red errors became soft amber warnings.
A phone app for hands-gooey-with-body-butter moments. Then a quiet beta with twelve other makers. Now: you.
Free for the first dozen recipes. Two weeks free on Maker. Your data is yours; export anytime, no questions asked.